Top 380 Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Lovely was the death Of Him whose life was Love! Holy with power, He on the thought-benighted Skeptic beamed Manifest Godhead.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

152. “O it is pleasant, with a heart at ease, Just after sunset, or by moonlight skies, To make the shifting clouds be what you please.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

153. “If a man is not rising upwards to be an angel, depend upon it, he is sinking downwards to be a devil. He cannot stop at the beast. The most savage of men are not beasts; they are worse, a great deal worse.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

154. “Not the poem which we have read, but that to which we return, with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential poetry .”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

155. “Sir, I admit your general rule, That every poet is a fool, But you yourself may serve to show it, That every fool is not a poet.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

156. “Joy is the sweet voice, joy the luminous cloud. We in ourselves rejoice! And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight, all melodies the echoes of that voice, all colours a suffusion from that light.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

157. “A Gothic church is a petrified religion.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

158. “And in Life’s noisiest hour, There whispers still the ceaseless Love of Thee, The heart’s Self-solace and soliloquy. You mould my Hopes, you fashion me within.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

159. “In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

160. “An ear for music is very different from a taste for music. I have no ear whatever; I could not sing an air to save my life; but I have the intensest delight in music, and can detect good from bad.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

161. “The best part of human language, properly so called, is derived from reflection on the acts of the mind itself.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

162. “I have found in the Bible words for my inmost thoughts, songs for my joy, utterance for my hidden griefs and pleadings for my shame and feebleness.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

163. “Everyone should have two or three hives of bees. Bees are easier to keep than a dog or a cat. They are more interesting than gerbils.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

164. “There is in every human countenance either a history or a prophecy which must sadden, or at least soften every reflecting observer.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

165. “The act of praying is the very highest energy of which the human mind is capable; praying, that is, with the total concentration of the faculties. The great mass of worldly men and of learned men are absolutely incapable of prayer.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

166. “I have heard of reasons manifold Why Love must needs be blind, But this the best of all I hold,- His eyes are in his mind.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

167. “Why is it that so many of us persist in thinking that autumn is a sad season? Nature has merely fallen asleep, and her dreams must be beautiful if we are to judge by her countenance.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

168. “The wise only possess ideas; the greater part of mankind are possessed by them.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

169. “No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

170. “The worth and value of knowledge is in proportion to the worth and value of its object.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

171. “What is an epigram? A dwarfish whole, its body brevity, and wit its soul.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

172. “Our quaint metaphysical opinions, in an hour of anguish, are like playthings by the bedside of a child deathly sick.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

173. “And I, the while, the sole unbusy thing, Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

174. “How well he fell asleepl Like some proud river, widening toward the sea; Calmly and grandly, silently and deep, Life joined eternity.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

175. “So lonely ’twas that God himself Scarce seemed there to be.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

176. “And all who heard should see them there, And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

177. “Poor little Foal of an oppressed race! I love the languid patience of thy face.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

178. “A sight to dream of, not to tell!”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

179. “By thy long grey beard and glittering eye, Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

180. “Motives by excess reverse their very nature and instead of exciting, stun and stupefy the mind.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

181. “Facts are not truths; they are not conclusions; they are not even premises, but in the nature and parts of premises.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

182. “Never can true courage dwell with them, Who, playing tricks with conscience, dare not look At their own vices.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

183. “Frenchmen are like gunpowder, each by itself smutty and contemptible, but mass them together and they are terrible indeed!”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

184. “I do not call the sod under my feet my country; but language-religion-government-blood-identity in these makes men of one country.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

185. “O Wedding-Guest! this soul hath been Alone on a wide wide sea: So lonely ’twas, that God himself Scarce seemed there to be.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

186. “No one does anything from a single motive.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

187. “I look’d to Heav’n, and try’d to pray; But or ever a prayer had gusht, A wicked whisper came and made My heart as dry as dust.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

188. “Oh Sleep! it is a gentle thing, beloved from pole to pole, to Mary Queen the praise be given! She sent the gentle sleep from Heaven, that slid into my soul.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

189. “O pure of heart! Thou needest not ask of me what this strong music in the soul may be!”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

190. “Stimulate the heart to love and the mind to be early accurate, and all other virtues will rise of their own accord, and all vices will be thrown out.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

191. “Praises of the unworthy are felt by ardent minds as robberies of the deserving.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

192. “To see him act is like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

193. “Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud Enveloping the Earth And from the soul itself must there be sent A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth Of all sweet sounds the life and element!”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

194. “Alas! they had been friends in youth; But whispering tongues can poison truth, And constancy lives in realms above; And life is thorny, and youth is vain; And to be wroth with one we love Doth work like madness in the brain.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

195. “Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

196. “Be that blind bard who on the Chian strand, By those deep sounds possessed with inward light, Beheld the Iliad and the Odyssey Rise to the swelling of the voiceful sea.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

197. “Brute animals have the vowel sounds; man only can utter consonants.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

198. “The first duty of a wise advocate is to convince his opponents that he understands their arguments, and sympathies with their just feelings.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

199. “No mind is thoroughly well organized that is deficient in a sense of humor.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

200. “Mr. Mum’s Rudesheimer And the church of St. Geryon Are the two things alone That deserve to be known In the body-and-soul-stinking town of Cologne.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge